The trouble with Helga

The publicity materials and booklet for Yigal Ozeri: Priscilla at Wade Wilson Art emphasize the photorealistic aspects of the Israeli-born, New York-based artist’s paintings of a young woman with blonde dreadlocks surrounded by vines in woodsy settings. Indeed, they appear to be faithfully based on photographs (perhaps high-resolution ones), echoing the blurry areas that result from low aperture settings and capturing detail where the camera would have been in focus.

Given the cheesiness of the photos they seem to be based on, however, the paintings’ photorealism may be the worst thing about them. In person, they look better because not only is it so readily apparent that they aren’t photos, but the painterly passages are what’s most interesting about them.

But Ozeri takes most of his liberties when painting Priscilla’s scarf, or vines, or bits of background — anything but Priscilla herself, who he appears to paint with scrupulously loyalty to the photo. The richness of paint handling disappears, and you’re stuck with a pretty, dreadlocked woman who is obviously posing for a photograph. The painting reveals nothing about her, but it’s not mysterious either. You stop wondering who she is to Ozeri as soon as you’ve asked the question. What interest there is in these paintings is not narrative or psychological. The one exception, for which I don’t have a jpeg, is one in which she’s relaxed, perhaps a little tired, and there aren’t so many vines tangled up around her locks, and you can see the stamp on her wrist that she must have gotten when she went out clubbing. Now we’ve got a smidgen of a story. The rest of the time, we’re just dealing with Ozeris’ formal concerns, which the model, through no fault of her own, just seems to be getting in the way of.

She’s supposed to be Ozeri’s Helga, I gather, but the problem she poses was articulated decades ago by Richard Diebenkorn, a very different painter, when he described his turn away from figuration toward his Ocean Park period:

I would find gradually I’d have to be knocking down this stuff that I liked in order to make it right with this figure, this environment, this representation. It was a kind of compromise — that on one hand can be marvelous, and what painting seems all about, and on the other becomes inhibiting constraint.

As a subject, I think Priscilla, at least in these paintings, is more of an inhibiting constraint for Ozeri than a marvelous compromise. I’d rather see him paint a pile of her scarves. Then the work might have conviction to match its technical skill.